Ever-increasing numbers of modern computing devices are being designed to utilize solid state drives (SSDs). Notably, while SSDs can provide a number of benefits over traditional, magnetic-based storage devices (e.g., hard drives), a number of their drawbacks have yet to be addressed. One example of a drawback stems from implementing a “copy-on-write” approach, in which any data undergoing modification is first copied, then modified, and then written into a different/available area of memory within the SSD. Notably, this can be problematic when carrying out transactions associated with certain types of data managed within the SSD—in particular, types of data that are frequently-modified, and where the average size of the data is less than or equal to the block size of the SSD. For example, in a given file system, respective file metadata for each file may require less than or equal to four kilobytes of storage, while the block size of the SSD is four kilobytes in size. In this example, performance encumbrances can quickly arise when transactions involve modifying a group of disparately-stored file metadata under the copy-on-write approach, where the SSD is burdened with carrying out small and isolated write operations.
Consequently, there exists a need for an improved technique for optimizing the manner in which file system metadata is managed within SSDs that implement copy-on-write techniques.